Thursday, June 14, 2018

Here is a piece below that I, McLean, posted at my blog & at the blog of Jennifer S. Chesler. The book that I am describing contains a variety of pieces to be found further back in Postmodernmortem Fragments.

Jennifer
S. Chesler writes of people in a manner reminiscent of the discussion
of the "New Philosophers" in Deleuze. So do I, McLean. Everything
becomes teratology. The human is no longer the rational animal, but the
defective monster.

This extends from Tiny Tom with his micropenis
to the "porn star" Michael, with a dick half the size of mine. The same
applies to the religious and arrogant psychiatrist, Dr. Bunghole, as he
is so appositely called. He sees himself as intelligent, but is in the
97th percentile. He is thus the opposite of an intellectual, a monster
who pretends to an interest in literature, mediated via the vulgar
phenomenon of the "book club". It is a moron that pretends to a life
devoted to Christian charity, revealing itself in a fascist policy of
turning his uneducated clients into drugged and bovine zombies.

In the earlier pieces by Chesler in her novel Fragments, teratology
enumerates a series of freaks. From the inarticulate morons who inhabit
"Rick's Gold Room" to the character "Little Jack", a primal non-human
emblem of male homosexual desire, none of the characters but the
narrator are fully human. The character with the micropenis, Tom, is
also seen in these earlier pieces as a psychological freak possessed by
his narcissism, in addition to his physical handicap and ensuing
inability to satisfy any woman sexually. Here is Fragments at Lulu.

The
similarity between the earlier procedure utilized by Chesler and my/our
present procedure is that we react to the defective, the inadequate,
not to condemn the marginalized, but to condemn those who affect to be
what they are not. Porn stars, in one case, men on any level in the
first case, or people who display Christian charity and service in the
latter. They are scumbags, and that which makes them monsters is the
most egregious bad faith. They seek an identity that is not theirs:
they seek to be that which they are not in order not to scream in the
dark night.

Friday, June 1, 2018

In
"Four Propositions on Psychoanalysis", Deleuze does not consider
psychiatry as such, but some arguments hold true of it in modified form,
& relate to Chesler's book.

Firstly,
psychoanalysis stifles the production of desire. Psychiatry attacks the
brain's chemistry to render desire an achievement. As a victim of
mismedication, Chesler writes of the mental hospital in "Down and Out in
Muncie, Indiana" - as an artist, we do not want to stifle & conquer
the alleged unconscious, we must produce it - & it is not easy to
create this infantile world, but it is our duty. Fascist psychiatrists
may believe that they mean well, but as Bukowski notes: there are no
good cops. Chesler's desire was stifled before then, deviated &
suppressed, but it sought itself in art, it found itself in me. In the
story in question, she is seen as surrounded by pointless ciphers, each
of them barely human, vermin. The mentally ill, the Herr Doktors, &
the fascist camp guards on the medical staff all played out their
allotted roles, like all the unintelligent they were unable to be
outside of their clearly delimited borders.

Secondly,
psychoanalysis abuses language, it keeps people from speaking, it takes
away the conditions of true expression, & thus it stifles
utterances, that strive to be indefinites, infinitives, proper names of
becomings. Psychoanalysis separates the expressing subject from the
subject of the utterance, Chesler does not try to speak her "I", except
in the meta-level excerpts alluded to in the previous analysis of the
work. She even masquerades this alleged "I" through the character "I" –
she subverts the entire psychiatric/psychoanalytic subversion of thought
by assuming the "I" as a proper name. The establishment uses personal
pronouns as weapons; they are part of its rape kit. The psychiatrist
sees the patient as part of an anonymous group categorized, in this
case, as "bipolar I" – this is horseshit. Each of them, these various
victims, is a unique name, indicating a haecceitas.

Thirdly,
psychiatry, like psychoanalysis, destroys utterance & desire by a
machine that interprets, & a machine that subjectivises its
subjects. They, this enemy, tell you who you are. Chesler defies the
process by the representation of an irreducible intensity, though this
book is full of placeholders, wasting space while an equal awaited her
unknowing, so the irreducible intensity is a failure & a sense of
despite, of disgust, spitting arrogant hatred at eyes that are full of
junk & nothingness.

Fourthly,
psychoanalysis involves power relationships. Now this is doubly true of
the psychiatric institution. Chesler's current psychiatrist, whom we
call Dr. Bunghole in our texts about him, is a moron who actually
boasted that his IQ was 130 to her, as if this were impressive. This
ludicrous arrogance stems from the fact that the branch of the police
called psychiatry is a medium of social control. It exacts an enforced
docility from the unruly bodies of the insane by the brutality of the
anti-psychotic. Chesler narrates in the story in question of a cretinous
nurse who behaved like a camp guard, a scumbag.

Art
should reveal truth, should indicate it & engage in the strenuous
activity of thought, says Heidegger. This Chesler does.